Good morning. We’re covering an affordability crisis in New York City — as well as Trump’s pick for attorney general, Russian missiles and bathing in oil.
Urban tweaks
New York City faces an affordability crisis. Rents have soared. The century-old subway needs to be modernized, and buses are painfully slow. Piles of trash bags often line the sidewalks. The person tasked with fixing these problems, Mayor Eric Adams, faces a major corruption scandal. His criminal case has obscured better news — that officials are advancing several ambitious proposals that hope to improve life in the city. The Democrats who run New York are crafting new policies because voters are concerned about their quality of life. The cost of living has become a campaign issue in Adams’s re-election next year, and his rivals are highlighting affordability. Here are the proposals and how they could make things better for New Yorkers: The proposalsBetter transit: The streets of Manhattan are choked with traffic and double-parked delivery trucks. The nation’s first congestion pricing plan will charge vehicles entering Manhattan south of Central Park to reduce traffic and raise money for the struggling transit system. Drivers pay to enter the tolling zone using electronic passes on their windshields or photos of their license plates.
The plan has been decades in the making. It still requires federal approval, and the Biden administration is poised to sign off before leaving office. Donald Trump and suburban lawmakers have vowed to kill it, arguing that it could hurt the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic. But New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, recently lowered the toll to $9 to help rally public support. Lower rental costs: Right now, if you rent an apartment in New York City, you have to pay thousands of dollars to a broker to secure a lease. A proposal in the City Council would shift that fee from renters to landlords. A progressive young lawmaker proposed the bill, which just passed despite opposition from the real estate industry. Critics argued that landlords would pass along the cost by raising rents. The law will probably take effect next summer. Cleaner sidewalks: Foul-smelling heaps of trash bags appear on city sidewalks on pickup day. They take up a lot of space, and they often tear and ooze into the street. Now the Adams administration is creating new rules for trash as part of the mayor’s war on rats. Starting this month, residential buildings with nine units or fewer must put garbage in cans. Eventually, the city will remove parking spots in dense neighborhoods to make way for large on-street containers. Other major cities, like Barcelona and Buenos Aires, already do this.
Some homeowners and building staffers oppose the new trash rules, complaining about the look of the bins and the requirement that garbage be kept indoors until closer to the pickup time. The political stakesThe new proposals show how changes in local policy can have a major impact on the lives of the city’s eight million residents. Here’s one example: I’m raising two little kids in Manhattan. The last mayor, Bill de Blasio, started a free preschool program for 3- and 4-year-olds — one that helped my family afford to stay in the city. (My son is in a city-funded preschool that he loves, saving us more than $30,000 per year.) The current proposals similarly aim to make it easier to live in the city. Supporters of the broker fee bill have argued that it will allow artists to keep living in New York so it doesn’t end up as a home only for the wealthy. Yesterday, the City Council moved forward with a proposal that would build more affordable housing in neighborhoods and remove rules that require new buildings to create parking spaces. That has been contentious, and lobbying from neighborhood groups has weakened the plan. They don’t want high-rise apartments in less dense neighborhoods, and they want new homes to provide parking. Although New Yorkers may disagree on tactics, most want to make the city more livable. More than half of voters here say the city is moving in the wrong direction. Even my 4-year-old wants to see some changes in our neighborhood. I was walking him home from preschool when we came across a mound of black trash bags lying in the crosswalk. As we veered around them, he scoffed and noted that they were not where they belonged. Related: Why is it so hard to build more housing in New York City? The different fates of two affordable housing developments help explain the city’s housing shortage.
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